Box 7.4 Confucianism in a Tumultuous Era
Confucius (Kong Fuzi, 551–479 B.C.E.) did not have a good twentieth century. The
final years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) brought the abolition of the Confucian civil
service examination system in 1905, the 1,300-year-old narrow path to cultural status
and political power in imperial China. Then in the 1910s, after the fall of the Qing, the
New Culture and May Fourth movements were led by students whose main goal was
the eradication of traditional Chinese culture including Confucianism, in favor of new
and radical ideas, from democracy and socialism, to pragmatism and feminism.
Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), the military and political ruler of the Republic of
China from 1927 until 1949 (and thereafter ruler of Taiwan until his death in 1975) tried
to revitalize Confucianism in his New Life movement of the 1930s, even enshrining
Confucianism as the state religion. But this effort fizzled with the urgency of revolution
and resistance of the Japanese invasion. Following the victory of the Chinese Com-
munist Party in 1949, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and all other faiths and tradi-
tional cultural remnants, were targeted in political campaigns by the revolutionary,
atheistic party.
Perhaps most devastating to Chinese culture was the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution launched in 1966. Begun as an effort by Party Chairman Mao Zedong
(1893–1976) to reassert his primacy by appealing to radical youngsters, the move-
ment quickly spun out of control into a period of chaotic violence, score settling, and
arbitrary persecution. Confucius was brought back only to be “struggled” against and
rebuked by the Red Guards, the hastily assembled brigades of students from college,
high school, and middle school. It seems that the fortunes of Confucius and Confu-
cianism could not get any worse until Red Guards even desecrated the Kong lin-
eage’s family tombs and shrines in Qufu, Shandong Province.
The chaos of the Cultural Revolution eventually subsided in the early 1970s, and
then ended completely with Mao’s death in 1976. The “reform and opening” period of
the 1980s and 1990s brought the People’s Republic of China onto the global stage as
an economic powerhouse. The twenty-first century has already proven considerably
better than the twentieth for Confucius. Confucianism has been revived in many
aspects of Chinese life, with the revitalized study of Confucius and Confucianism, the
reopening and refurbishing of Confucian temples, the observation of traditional holi-
days like the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, and more recently with the establishment of
Confucius Institutes around the world by the Chinese Ministry of Education.
These institutes, comparable in some ways to the Écoles Françaises and the
Goethe Institutes, develop in bilateral agreements with hundreds of international part-
ners, mainly universities around the world. They are a soft power initiative of the Chi-
nese government to help cultivate a positive image of the PRC and to encourage the
study of the Chinese language and culture among thousands of people around the
world who would not otherwise have access to these studies. While controversy about
Chinese government control has followed some of these institutes, the considerable
matching financial commitments of the Ministry of Education are a very appealing
prospect to institutions where Chinese language instruction and an infusion of fund-
ing are welcome. After the buffeting that Confucius endured in the twentieth century, it
is striking that a massive international goodwill initiative like the Confucius Institutes
should bear his name.